Life Ceremony, page 6
When I was little, it was forbidden to eat human flesh. I’m certain it was.
Now, however, the custom of eating flesh has become so deeply ingrained in our society that little by little, I’m becoming less confident about what things were like before. But thirty years ago, when I was still in kindergarten, I’m sure it was strictly taboo.
Riding the school bus, we’d already gotten tired of playing at word chains and had started naming things we wanted to eat. The children followed one after another, saying things like “A cloud! So soft and yummy!” “Candy floss! ’Cos it’s sweet!” and then someone said, “An elephant! They’re huge, and I’ll feel stuffed after eating it!”
After that greedy child, others followed with the names of animals. “Well then, a giraffe!” “A monkey!” This last comment was from my best friend, and as a joke, I’d followed it unthinkingly with “A human!”
The whole bus erupted at my answer.
“Whaaat?”
“Creepy!”
Even my best friend was in tears. “Maho, I can’t believe you’d say something so scary!!!” she stuttered, sobs punctuating her words and snot running from her nose.
In no time at all, like a chain reaction, everyone on the bus was crying and wailing.
After hearing what had happened, the teacher was furious with me. “Maho, you mustn’t say things like that, even as a joke. You’ll get into big trouble,” she said, her face grim. I was crestfallen. I simply couldn’t understand why it was okay to joke about eating a monkey, but not about eating a human.
Even now, I could still clearly recall the eyes of the stern-faced bus driver glaring at me, not to mention the terrifying expression on the face of our normally kind teacher and all my friends wailing behind her. I was scared stiff, sitting in the bus with my head bowed, unable to utter a single word.
All the humans on the bus, filled with righteousness, were reviling me. White-faced and tense, I shrank into my seat and held my breath. If anyone had shouted at me, my fear would have exploded and I would have wet myself.
Since then, however, the human race had changed little by little. The population shrank abruptly, and the world has become gripped with the fear that the human race might actually go extinct. This has had the effect of procreation morphing into a form of social justice.
We humans had gradually transformed over the past thirty years. Nowadays, few people ever talked about sex, referring to it rather as insemination with the specific aim of creating new life, and this became the mainstream view.
And whenever somebody died, it was customary to hold a type of ritual called a life ceremony instead of a funeral. Some people still held an old-fashioned wake and funeral, but financial subsidies were available for life ceremonies, so the vast majority opted for this considerably cheaper alternative.
Guests at a life ceremony would eat the deceased’s body, and also seek an insemination partner among the other guests. As soon as a man and woman coupled off, they would leave the ceremony and go outside for insemination. Based on the idea of birthing life from death, this ceremony was a perfect fit for the mentality of the masses and their unconscious obsession with breeding.
Recently I’d been getting the feeling that humans had begun to resemble cockroaches in their habits. Cockroaches would apparently all gather to eat a deceased one of their number, and I’d also heard that a cockroach about to die would lay a huge number of eggs. Tribes that gathered to mourn and eat the deceased had existed since antiquity, though, so it wasn’t as though the custom had only now just sprung up among humans.
Yamamoto lit up a 1mg American Spirit, then chuckled. “Are you telling me you still hold a grudge about something that happened to you as a kid?”
The smoking room at work was in one corner of a space we called the common room that had a vending machine and a few chairs. It was partitioned off by glass, and I often met people from other departments in there. It was here that I first got talking to Yamamoto, too.
Yamamoto was short and plump and good-natured, and, at thirty-nine, three years older than me. He was good-natured and I liked the way he always listened to what I had to say, and though he often laughed, he never laughed my opinions off. I always felt comfortable with him and ended up telling him things I wouldn’t tell anyone else.
Sulkily I chewed the filter of my Hi-lite menthol cigarette. “It’s not that I hold a grudge particularly. It’s just that thirty years ago a completely different sense of values was the norm, and I just can’t keep up with the changes. I kind of feel like I’ve been betrayed by the world.”
Yamamoto blinked. His eyes were small and round, with long lashes. “Well, I guess I know what you mean. I think it was forbidden to eat human flesh around the time I was in kindergarten.”
“Right? I’m totally certain it was! Yet nowadays everybody says it’s such a great thing to do. That’s what I can’t get my head around.”
“Oh well. So, what about tonight? Are you going to Mr. Nakao’s life ceremony?”
“What about you?”
Yamamoto wasn’t one of those who adamantly opposed eating human flesh, but he didn’t particularly like to, so I found it reassuring when he was around. Even now that eating human flesh had become mainstream, there was still a deeply rooted faction opposed to it and groups campaigned against it, saying it was unethical. However, it wasn’t that Yamamoto or I opposed eating it on ethical grounds. In Yamamoto’s case, at the age of twelve he’d suffered a bout of food poisoning after eating some slightly raw flesh at his grandfather’s life ceremony. In my case, I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong about eating human flesh—after all, when I was little I’d said that I wanted to eat it, even if it was a joke—but I felt indignant that the ethic by which I’d been judged had turned out not to exist in the first place.
“Maybe I’ll go,” Yamamoto said, scratching the back of his neck. “It’d be good if I end up inseminating someone.”
“Really? Maybe I’ll go too, then.”
I’d run out of cigarettes, so I took one from Yamamoto’s box of American Spirits. “Do you like these?” I asked him. “You only smoke more when they’re weak, which means you spend more and it ends up being worse for your health, too.”
“It’s okay—I like them better like this.” He blew out smoke, savoring the taste.
Not many people smoked, so Yamamoto and I had the space to ourselves.
It was tiny, less than one tatami mat in size, and looking out through the glass gave the sensation of being a goldfish in a bowl.
I blew out smoke from the cigarette I’d cadged from him. We chatted in the white fog we’d created from the smoke, gazing at the clear world outside.
That evening, Yamamoto and I headed out together to Mr. Nakao’s life ceremony. The objective of a life ceremony was to give birth to new life, so skimpy clothing or showy outfits were the norm. I was still dressed in my gray work suit, but Yamamoto was wearing a red-checkered shirt with white pants.
“It’s best to dress flashily for a life ceremony,” he said cheerfully, but the outfit didn’t really suit his dark complexion.
Mr. Nakao’s house was in an expensive residential area in Setagaya ward. It was dinnertime, and cooking smells hung in the air all around. No doubt Mr. Nakao’s flesh being boiled was mixed in with them.
“Here it is,” said Yamamoto, checking the map on his phone. It was a large house, beginning to show signs of age, and an aroma of miso came from inside.
“Miso soup! Maybe with some white miso mixed in? Smells delicious!” Yamamoto said happily, sniffing the air as he went inside.
In the entrance hall, a sign on pink paper read masaru nakao life ceremony.
We called out “Good evening” as we opened the door, and an elegant white-haired woman wearing an apron, apparently Mrs. Nakao, came out to greet us.
“Oh, so good of you to come. Please do come in. We’re just about to start,” she said, ushering us through to the living room. Two large earthenware cooking pots were already on the table in the center of the room, which had been decorated with lots of seasonal flowers. It occurred to me that the pots must have been the beloved possessions of Mr. Nakao when he was alive. For many years, he had used them for cooking rice with seasonal ingredients, which he would share with us at work.
Human flesh has quite a strong smell and taste, so it isn’t considered suitable for simple grilling with a little salt and pepper. Most people thoroughly parboil it, then add it to a hotpot with vegetables and plenty of miso for flavor. And it is common to have a specialist company help with the preparation. As I went in, a number of men in overalls were on their way out, bowing their heads as they left.
Men and women dressed to the nines were seated around the hotpots. Some of them were already exchanging flirtatious looks and starting a conversation with someone they found attractive. It appeared the life ceremony was already well underway.
“Thank you, everyone, for coming to my husband’s life ceremony,” Mrs. Nakao said, opening the lids of the hotpots to reveal Mr. Nakao, boiled together with Chinese cabbage, enoki mushrooms, and other vegetables. “Please partake of his life, and create new life.”
“Itadakimasu!”
Everybody held their hands together and gave thanks for the meal, then began tucking into Mr. Nakao, praising him as they took neat, thin slices of his meat to their mouths.
“Delicious! Mrs. Nakao, your husband is really tasty.”
A white-haired elderly man nodded as he put some meat into his mouth. “It really is a good custom, isn’t it? We partake of life, we create life . . .”
Mrs. Nakao dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief upon hearing these words. “That’s right. My husband will be pleased, too,” she said. “These parts over here are the ones closest to the innards, and really tasty. Please do eat them up. You youngsters, eat as much life as you can, then get on with insemination.”
The elderly man tried to give me a bowl of the meat, so I hastily said, “Just some Chinese cabbage for me.”
“I’ll have some shiitake and enoki mushrooms,” said Yamamoto.
“Oh? You two dislike human flesh, do you?” the old man said, tilting his head in bemusement.
“It’s not that, it’s just I got food poisoning from it once long ago,” Yamamoto replied. “Ever since, I always seem to get diarrhea whenever I try it, so I prefer to stick to vegetables, really.”
“And having heard this, I also find it hard to eat it . . . I’m sorry,” I apologized. It was a lot of work to prepare a human body for cooking. Even with the help of professionals, Mrs. Nakao must have been hard at work since morning.
She smiled sadly and served me some Chinese cabbage. “It’s okay, don’t worry. But Mr. Nakao would be so pleased if you ate him, so please do help yourself anytime you feel like it.”
Just then a young woman in a pink dress and a man in a white jacket stood up, holding hands. They had been whispering to each other and touching knees as they ate the flesh hotpot.
“Well, we’re going to go ahead with insemination now.”
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. Congratulations!”
There was some applause as the couple bowed to Mrs. Nakao. “Thank you so much. We will do our best to create a new life,” they said, and left, still holding hands.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Mr. Nakao were reborn in a new life!” Yamamoto said with a smile. He drank some of the soup made with the stock from Mr. Nakao’s body.
“Wouldn’t it!” Mrs. Nakao said. “I wonder how many inseminations will happen tonight? I do hope lots of new lives will be created!” She gazed affectionately at the pots. The soup made from red and white miso mixed together was a rich brown color, and you couldn’t really see Mr. Nakao inside it.
In the end, Yamamoto and I took our leave from the life ceremony, neither of us having found an insemination partner.
Yamamoto slipped and almost fell as we walked along a back alley. “Argh!”
“Are you okay? Have you had too much to drink?”
“No, it’s not that.”
Yamamoto looked sadly at his shoe. He’d apparently stepped in some semen that had spilled on the street.
I’d heard that in the old days, sex was considered dirty, and it was normal to do it out of sight. I’d never been inseminated at a life ceremony, but it was true that whenever I’d done it with a lover, we’d always used a bedroom or some other place where we wouldn’t be seen. The old customs were probably still left in my body, even if I wasn’t aware of them.
Nevertheless, insemination after a life ceremony was generally considered sacred and could be carried out anywhere. I’d seen it being done on the street at night any number of times, and it looked to me just like plain copulation. I had the feeling that humans were becoming more and more like animals.
“So they’ve built another center out here too, eh?” Yamamoto said, his breath smelling of alcohol.
He was referring to another children’s center. Of course, children conceived during insemination were mostly raised in a family, but recently there were more and more cases where nobody knew who the child’s father was. This was particularly true of pregnancies that followed life ceremonies. But the priority was to increase the population, so everyone was happy about the children born in these circumstances too.
As a result, centers were set up to take care of children so that women could carry on working while also producing children whenever they wanted to. After giving birth in the hospital within the center itself, some mothers simply left the baby there while others took the baby home for a while and delivered it to the center later. Roughly half of the children were raised in a family, and half were left as babies for the center to raise.
Many people were strongly against the centers, as they believed it would lead to the family system breaking down. The new childbirth system evidently hadn’t received the same level of acceptance as life ceremonies. Nevertheless, at this rate, more and more children were likely to be raised outside the family system, and it was no longer possible to predict what would become of the human race. Various researchers were publishing their findings, expressing both positive and pessimistic views.
We may be headed in a dangerous direction, but the vague conclusion seemed to be that we wouldn’t know unless we tried.
“I wonder what will happen if more and more children are raised at centers,” Yamamoto murmured.
Nobody knew the answer to that. All I knew was that we were undergoing radical changes in society.
“Good morning!”
A woman who had been off work the last two weeks was greeted back in the office with a round of applause. At the age of thirty-six, she had taken leave to give birth to her third child.
“Did you pop the baby out at the center?”
“Yep, and I’m leaving it to them. I’m exhausted!”
“Thank you.”
“Good job, well done.”
Everyone was grateful for her having given birth for the benefit of the human race. She looked pleased as she accepted the bouquet of flowers presented to her.
At the centers, children were carefully raised as children of the human race, not of individual parents. The facilities were well equipped, and there was one counselor for every five children.
I had been inseminated by a lover, but it hadn’t resulted in pregnancy, and I was relieved to see women like her who had given birth to lots of children. I was a member of the human race too, so I suppose I was keen for my own animal species to continue.
After accepting the bouquet, the woman went to her desk.
“I’ve been inseminated by my lover many times, but all three pregnancies were from a life ceremony,” she said. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? It seems the pregnancy rate from life ceremonies is pretty high.”
“Miraculous!” a younger woman said, enraptured.
“I can see why, really. Human meat is special, isn’t it? It feels sacred, and it tastes good too.”
“I hear you. I feel like it’s human instinct to want to eat human flesh.”
I felt like pointing out that until a moment ago they had been talking about a different human instinct. Instinct doesn’t exist. Morals don’t exist. They were just fake sensibilities that came from a world that was constantly transforming.
“What’s up, Maho? You look angry!”
“No, not at all,” I said quietly, and drank up the rest of my tea.
“Don’t you think everyone’s being weird with this instinct thing?” I asked Yamamoto. I drained my glass of beer in one gulp, slammed it down on the counter, and glared at him.
It was only Monday, but I really felt like having a drink and, having bumped into him in the smoking room, I’d dragged him out with me to an izakaya near the office. He was the only person I could talk to about these kinds of things.
Yamamoto listened to me, nodding now and then, without agreeing or disagreeing. It was that sense of respect for distance that made me feel comfortable with him.
“You know,” I said, “when it comes to insemination, my mother said that back in the old days, it was good manners to wear a condom when you had sex. Do that now, and you’re told off for copulating for pleasure and not in order to give birth to new life. It doesn’t make any sense!”
“Well, there’s no need to get so worked up about it,” Yamamoto said, leisurely taking a piece of fried chicken to his mouth.
“Listen to me!”
“I am. But you know, you’re a bit stubborn. You’re the one who sees things in absolutes. It’s like you want to have everything your way.”
“What do you mean?”
Yamamoto put down his chopsticks, wiped his hands with the disposable towel, and pursed his lips, his expression unusually stern.
“Seriously, though,” he said. “It’s the way the world is, right? Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone. But that’s not true—actually, they’re always changing. That’s what I think. And this isn’t something that’s happened all of a sudden, like you seem to think. It’s always been that way. Things keep transforming.”
Now, however, the custom of eating flesh has become so deeply ingrained in our society that little by little, I’m becoming less confident about what things were like before. But thirty years ago, when I was still in kindergarten, I’m sure it was strictly taboo.
Riding the school bus, we’d already gotten tired of playing at word chains and had started naming things we wanted to eat. The children followed one after another, saying things like “A cloud! So soft and yummy!” “Candy floss! ’Cos it’s sweet!” and then someone said, “An elephant! They’re huge, and I’ll feel stuffed after eating it!”
After that greedy child, others followed with the names of animals. “Well then, a giraffe!” “A monkey!” This last comment was from my best friend, and as a joke, I’d followed it unthinkingly with “A human!”
The whole bus erupted at my answer.
“Whaaat?”
“Creepy!”
Even my best friend was in tears. “Maho, I can’t believe you’d say something so scary!!!” she stuttered, sobs punctuating her words and snot running from her nose.
In no time at all, like a chain reaction, everyone on the bus was crying and wailing.
After hearing what had happened, the teacher was furious with me. “Maho, you mustn’t say things like that, even as a joke. You’ll get into big trouble,” she said, her face grim. I was crestfallen. I simply couldn’t understand why it was okay to joke about eating a monkey, but not about eating a human.
Even now, I could still clearly recall the eyes of the stern-faced bus driver glaring at me, not to mention the terrifying expression on the face of our normally kind teacher and all my friends wailing behind her. I was scared stiff, sitting in the bus with my head bowed, unable to utter a single word.
All the humans on the bus, filled with righteousness, were reviling me. White-faced and tense, I shrank into my seat and held my breath. If anyone had shouted at me, my fear would have exploded and I would have wet myself.
Since then, however, the human race had changed little by little. The population shrank abruptly, and the world has become gripped with the fear that the human race might actually go extinct. This has had the effect of procreation morphing into a form of social justice.
We humans had gradually transformed over the past thirty years. Nowadays, few people ever talked about sex, referring to it rather as insemination with the specific aim of creating new life, and this became the mainstream view.
And whenever somebody died, it was customary to hold a type of ritual called a life ceremony instead of a funeral. Some people still held an old-fashioned wake and funeral, but financial subsidies were available for life ceremonies, so the vast majority opted for this considerably cheaper alternative.
Guests at a life ceremony would eat the deceased’s body, and also seek an insemination partner among the other guests. As soon as a man and woman coupled off, they would leave the ceremony and go outside for insemination. Based on the idea of birthing life from death, this ceremony was a perfect fit for the mentality of the masses and their unconscious obsession with breeding.
Recently I’d been getting the feeling that humans had begun to resemble cockroaches in their habits. Cockroaches would apparently all gather to eat a deceased one of their number, and I’d also heard that a cockroach about to die would lay a huge number of eggs. Tribes that gathered to mourn and eat the deceased had existed since antiquity, though, so it wasn’t as though the custom had only now just sprung up among humans.
Yamamoto lit up a 1mg American Spirit, then chuckled. “Are you telling me you still hold a grudge about something that happened to you as a kid?”
The smoking room at work was in one corner of a space we called the common room that had a vending machine and a few chairs. It was partitioned off by glass, and I often met people from other departments in there. It was here that I first got talking to Yamamoto, too.
Yamamoto was short and plump and good-natured, and, at thirty-nine, three years older than me. He was good-natured and I liked the way he always listened to what I had to say, and though he often laughed, he never laughed my opinions off. I always felt comfortable with him and ended up telling him things I wouldn’t tell anyone else.
Sulkily I chewed the filter of my Hi-lite menthol cigarette. “It’s not that I hold a grudge particularly. It’s just that thirty years ago a completely different sense of values was the norm, and I just can’t keep up with the changes. I kind of feel like I’ve been betrayed by the world.”
Yamamoto blinked. His eyes were small and round, with long lashes. “Well, I guess I know what you mean. I think it was forbidden to eat human flesh around the time I was in kindergarten.”
“Right? I’m totally certain it was! Yet nowadays everybody says it’s such a great thing to do. That’s what I can’t get my head around.”
“Oh well. So, what about tonight? Are you going to Mr. Nakao’s life ceremony?”
“What about you?”
Yamamoto wasn’t one of those who adamantly opposed eating human flesh, but he didn’t particularly like to, so I found it reassuring when he was around. Even now that eating human flesh had become mainstream, there was still a deeply rooted faction opposed to it and groups campaigned against it, saying it was unethical. However, it wasn’t that Yamamoto or I opposed eating it on ethical grounds. In Yamamoto’s case, at the age of twelve he’d suffered a bout of food poisoning after eating some slightly raw flesh at his grandfather’s life ceremony. In my case, I didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong about eating human flesh—after all, when I was little I’d said that I wanted to eat it, even if it was a joke—but I felt indignant that the ethic by which I’d been judged had turned out not to exist in the first place.
“Maybe I’ll go,” Yamamoto said, scratching the back of his neck. “It’d be good if I end up inseminating someone.”
“Really? Maybe I’ll go too, then.”
I’d run out of cigarettes, so I took one from Yamamoto’s box of American Spirits. “Do you like these?” I asked him. “You only smoke more when they’re weak, which means you spend more and it ends up being worse for your health, too.”
“It’s okay—I like them better like this.” He blew out smoke, savoring the taste.
Not many people smoked, so Yamamoto and I had the space to ourselves.
It was tiny, less than one tatami mat in size, and looking out through the glass gave the sensation of being a goldfish in a bowl.
I blew out smoke from the cigarette I’d cadged from him. We chatted in the white fog we’d created from the smoke, gazing at the clear world outside.
That evening, Yamamoto and I headed out together to Mr. Nakao’s life ceremony. The objective of a life ceremony was to give birth to new life, so skimpy clothing or showy outfits were the norm. I was still dressed in my gray work suit, but Yamamoto was wearing a red-checkered shirt with white pants.
“It’s best to dress flashily for a life ceremony,” he said cheerfully, but the outfit didn’t really suit his dark complexion.
Mr. Nakao’s house was in an expensive residential area in Setagaya ward. It was dinnertime, and cooking smells hung in the air all around. No doubt Mr. Nakao’s flesh being boiled was mixed in with them.
“Here it is,” said Yamamoto, checking the map on his phone. It was a large house, beginning to show signs of age, and an aroma of miso came from inside.
“Miso soup! Maybe with some white miso mixed in? Smells delicious!” Yamamoto said happily, sniffing the air as he went inside.
In the entrance hall, a sign on pink paper read masaru nakao life ceremony.
We called out “Good evening” as we opened the door, and an elegant white-haired woman wearing an apron, apparently Mrs. Nakao, came out to greet us.
“Oh, so good of you to come. Please do come in. We’re just about to start,” she said, ushering us through to the living room. Two large earthenware cooking pots were already on the table in the center of the room, which had been decorated with lots of seasonal flowers. It occurred to me that the pots must have been the beloved possessions of Mr. Nakao when he was alive. For many years, he had used them for cooking rice with seasonal ingredients, which he would share with us at work.
Human flesh has quite a strong smell and taste, so it isn’t considered suitable for simple grilling with a little salt and pepper. Most people thoroughly parboil it, then add it to a hotpot with vegetables and plenty of miso for flavor. And it is common to have a specialist company help with the preparation. As I went in, a number of men in overalls were on their way out, bowing their heads as they left.
Men and women dressed to the nines were seated around the hotpots. Some of them were already exchanging flirtatious looks and starting a conversation with someone they found attractive. It appeared the life ceremony was already well underway.
“Thank you, everyone, for coming to my husband’s life ceremony,” Mrs. Nakao said, opening the lids of the hotpots to reveal Mr. Nakao, boiled together with Chinese cabbage, enoki mushrooms, and other vegetables. “Please partake of his life, and create new life.”
“Itadakimasu!”
Everybody held their hands together and gave thanks for the meal, then began tucking into Mr. Nakao, praising him as they took neat, thin slices of his meat to their mouths.
“Delicious! Mrs. Nakao, your husband is really tasty.”
A white-haired elderly man nodded as he put some meat into his mouth. “It really is a good custom, isn’t it? We partake of life, we create life . . .”
Mrs. Nakao dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief upon hearing these words. “That’s right. My husband will be pleased, too,” she said. “These parts over here are the ones closest to the innards, and really tasty. Please do eat them up. You youngsters, eat as much life as you can, then get on with insemination.”
The elderly man tried to give me a bowl of the meat, so I hastily said, “Just some Chinese cabbage for me.”
“I’ll have some shiitake and enoki mushrooms,” said Yamamoto.
“Oh? You two dislike human flesh, do you?” the old man said, tilting his head in bemusement.
“It’s not that, it’s just I got food poisoning from it once long ago,” Yamamoto replied. “Ever since, I always seem to get diarrhea whenever I try it, so I prefer to stick to vegetables, really.”
“And having heard this, I also find it hard to eat it . . . I’m sorry,” I apologized. It was a lot of work to prepare a human body for cooking. Even with the help of professionals, Mrs. Nakao must have been hard at work since morning.
She smiled sadly and served me some Chinese cabbage. “It’s okay, don’t worry. But Mr. Nakao would be so pleased if you ate him, so please do help yourself anytime you feel like it.”
Just then a young woman in a pink dress and a man in a white jacket stood up, holding hands. They had been whispering to each other and touching knees as they ate the flesh hotpot.
“Well, we’re going to go ahead with insemination now.”
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. Congratulations!”
There was some applause as the couple bowed to Mrs. Nakao. “Thank you so much. We will do our best to create a new life,” they said, and left, still holding hands.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Mr. Nakao were reborn in a new life!” Yamamoto said with a smile. He drank some of the soup made with the stock from Mr. Nakao’s body.
“Wouldn’t it!” Mrs. Nakao said. “I wonder how many inseminations will happen tonight? I do hope lots of new lives will be created!” She gazed affectionately at the pots. The soup made from red and white miso mixed together was a rich brown color, and you couldn’t really see Mr. Nakao inside it.
In the end, Yamamoto and I took our leave from the life ceremony, neither of us having found an insemination partner.
Yamamoto slipped and almost fell as we walked along a back alley. “Argh!”
“Are you okay? Have you had too much to drink?”
“No, it’s not that.”
Yamamoto looked sadly at his shoe. He’d apparently stepped in some semen that had spilled on the street.
I’d heard that in the old days, sex was considered dirty, and it was normal to do it out of sight. I’d never been inseminated at a life ceremony, but it was true that whenever I’d done it with a lover, we’d always used a bedroom or some other place where we wouldn’t be seen. The old customs were probably still left in my body, even if I wasn’t aware of them.
Nevertheless, insemination after a life ceremony was generally considered sacred and could be carried out anywhere. I’d seen it being done on the street at night any number of times, and it looked to me just like plain copulation. I had the feeling that humans were becoming more and more like animals.
“So they’ve built another center out here too, eh?” Yamamoto said, his breath smelling of alcohol.
He was referring to another children’s center. Of course, children conceived during insemination were mostly raised in a family, but recently there were more and more cases where nobody knew who the child’s father was. This was particularly true of pregnancies that followed life ceremonies. But the priority was to increase the population, so everyone was happy about the children born in these circumstances too.
As a result, centers were set up to take care of children so that women could carry on working while also producing children whenever they wanted to. After giving birth in the hospital within the center itself, some mothers simply left the baby there while others took the baby home for a while and delivered it to the center later. Roughly half of the children were raised in a family, and half were left as babies for the center to raise.
Many people were strongly against the centers, as they believed it would lead to the family system breaking down. The new childbirth system evidently hadn’t received the same level of acceptance as life ceremonies. Nevertheless, at this rate, more and more children were likely to be raised outside the family system, and it was no longer possible to predict what would become of the human race. Various researchers were publishing their findings, expressing both positive and pessimistic views.
We may be headed in a dangerous direction, but the vague conclusion seemed to be that we wouldn’t know unless we tried.
“I wonder what will happen if more and more children are raised at centers,” Yamamoto murmured.
Nobody knew the answer to that. All I knew was that we were undergoing radical changes in society.
“Good morning!”
A woman who had been off work the last two weeks was greeted back in the office with a round of applause. At the age of thirty-six, she had taken leave to give birth to her third child.
“Did you pop the baby out at the center?”
“Yep, and I’m leaving it to them. I’m exhausted!”
“Thank you.”
“Good job, well done.”
Everyone was grateful for her having given birth for the benefit of the human race. She looked pleased as she accepted the bouquet of flowers presented to her.
At the centers, children were carefully raised as children of the human race, not of individual parents. The facilities were well equipped, and there was one counselor for every five children.
I had been inseminated by a lover, but it hadn’t resulted in pregnancy, and I was relieved to see women like her who had given birth to lots of children. I was a member of the human race too, so I suppose I was keen for my own animal species to continue.
After accepting the bouquet, the woman went to her desk.
“I’ve been inseminated by my lover many times, but all three pregnancies were from a life ceremony,” she said. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? It seems the pregnancy rate from life ceremonies is pretty high.”
“Miraculous!” a younger woman said, enraptured.
“I can see why, really. Human meat is special, isn’t it? It feels sacred, and it tastes good too.”
“I hear you. I feel like it’s human instinct to want to eat human flesh.”
I felt like pointing out that until a moment ago they had been talking about a different human instinct. Instinct doesn’t exist. Morals don’t exist. They were just fake sensibilities that came from a world that was constantly transforming.
“What’s up, Maho? You look angry!”
“No, not at all,” I said quietly, and drank up the rest of my tea.
“Don’t you think everyone’s being weird with this instinct thing?” I asked Yamamoto. I drained my glass of beer in one gulp, slammed it down on the counter, and glared at him.
It was only Monday, but I really felt like having a drink and, having bumped into him in the smoking room, I’d dragged him out with me to an izakaya near the office. He was the only person I could talk to about these kinds of things.
Yamamoto listened to me, nodding now and then, without agreeing or disagreeing. It was that sense of respect for distance that made me feel comfortable with him.
“You know,” I said, “when it comes to insemination, my mother said that back in the old days, it was good manners to wear a condom when you had sex. Do that now, and you’re told off for copulating for pleasure and not in order to give birth to new life. It doesn’t make any sense!”
“Well, there’s no need to get so worked up about it,” Yamamoto said, leisurely taking a piece of fried chicken to his mouth.
“Listen to me!”
“I am. But you know, you’re a bit stubborn. You’re the one who sees things in absolutes. It’s like you want to have everything your way.”
“What do you mean?”
Yamamoto put down his chopsticks, wiped his hands with the disposable towel, and pursed his lips, his expression unusually stern.
“Seriously, though,” he said. “It’s the way the world is, right? Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone. But that’s not true—actually, they’re always changing. That’s what I think. And this isn’t something that’s happened all of a sudden, like you seem to think. It’s always been that way. Things keep transforming.”
